The present invention relates to electrical circuit apparatus, and, more particularly, to an optical fiber connector of the type used to connect an electrical circuit board and optical fibers.
A recent advance in optical communication technology has realized an optical interconnection wherein an electrical signal is converted into an optical signal which in turn is transmitted through the use of optical fibers. Advantages of the optical interconnection using optical fibers can be enumerated as follows.
Firstly, by arraying optical fibers each having a small diameter in a sheet configuration, space reduction can be attained. The optical fibers arrayed in a sheet configuration can afford to permit a mechanism for alignment of optical axes of connectors supporting the optical fibers to be common to these connectors, thus accomplishing reduction in size of the connector.
Secondly, the optical fiber can transmit a signal of the order of Gbps (giga-bit/second). Such signals would be degraded in signal waveform by a coaxial cable, and would be difficult to transmit therethrough. Therefore, the use of optical fiber increases the throughput of signal transmission.
Thirdly, the occurrence of crosstalk noise and common ground noise which are increased in proportion to frequency components of signal and density of signal lines can be prevented.
These advantages are useful especially to switching systems and computers in which a great number of electronic circuit parts are interconnected together by a great number of high-speed signal lines to perform high-speed processing, and the possibility of applying the optical interconnect technology to these apparatus has been studied by many researchers.
For example, in experimental results of transmission using a thin LED/PD array module for optical parallel transmission which were announced in the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication of Engineers, Nation-wide Conference, Spring, 1990, 8-944, C-276 and C-277, an example was reported where from the standpoint of size reduction of optoelectrical converters, an electrical circuit and an electrooptical signal converter as well as an electrical circuit and an opto/electrical signal converter are integrally formed into an integrated circuit to attain the size reduction.
Also, in JP-A-58-12450 entitled "Inter-package Optical Transmission System" and JP-A-58-12451 entitled "Mother Board and Inter-package Optical Connection System", an example is disclosed where an optoelectrical converter is disposed at an edge portion of a board carrying electronic circuit parts and an electrical signal is multiplexed and converted into an optical signal which in turn is transmitted between boards.
Although being considered as general conception of optical interconnection connector not related to specific apparatus, a technique is known as disclosed in "Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 72, July 1984", according to which a multiplexing circuit and an optoelectrical converter are formed on a GaAs chip, electrical circuits formed on a plurality of Si chips surround the GaAs chip and a plurality of signals transmitted from the plurality of Si chips are multiplexed on the GaAs chip so as to be transmitted using a single optical fiber.
In JP-A-62-76332, a connector for connecting optical fibers and an electrical circuit board incorporates an optoelectrical converter and an elect-optical converter, in order that the optical fibers can readily be mounted to or dismounted from the board.